The NSVRC collects information and resources to assist those working to prevent sexual violence and to improve resources, outreach and response strategies. This resource section includes access to NSVRC collections and selected online resources.

In September 2016, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault released guidance for school districts around creating and sustaining a specific sexual misconduct policy, specifically recommending that districts address sexual violence prevention in their policy. These talking points offer additional suggestions on how to include prevention in a comprehensive sexual misconduct policy for grades K-12.

As part of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, the CDC was tasked with identifying promising practices to prevent sexual violence on college and university campuses. In collaboration with the Department of Justice’s Office of Violence against Women, Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) Office, and the Department of Education this tool offers an overview of how to approach sexual violence prevention on college campuses with real-world examples from the field.

As Virginia’s leading voice on sexual and domestic violence, the Virginia Sexual & Domestic Violence Action Alliance believes all college students have the right to learn and live in an educational environment where they are safe and treated equally. This is the overarching spirit of Title IX, the Clery Act, and Virginia campus safety legislation. The presence of sexual violence, dating/domestic violence, stalking, and other gender-based violence threatens this right. We also know that institutional and societal oppressions compound the negative effects of violence on students of color and other historically marginalized groups. We have heard from Virginia’s colleges and universities that you/they are hungry for concrete guidelines and examples of promising and best practices in Virginia and nationwide; to respond to this gap in resources, we researched and wrote a set of best practices guides for Virginia’s college and university campuses.

What makes these guides different from the other best practices guides for campuses?

The Safety and Justice for All guides outline best-practice recommendations to help campus professionals move beyond regulatory compliance and to institute trauma-informed and racial justice oriented prevention and responses to gender-based violence.

Recommendations are based on specific roles on campus

Key recommendations included in the guides are organized into six groups:

administrators;

advocates (both on- and off-campus);

faculty and other instructional employees;

Title IX coordinators and campus disciplinary professionals;

campus law enforcement and security officers; and

prevention specialists.

We created an edition specifically for Community Colleges

Due to the unique context of Virginia’s Community Colleges, we created a separate guide for those institutions. The structure and framework for the Community College guide are the same; several recommendations in this guide were adapted to address Community College specific concerns and utilize Community College examples.

Virginia’s colleges, universities, and community colleges are doing excellent work to respond to and prevent gender-based violence. These guides feature concrete examples of ways that institutions and organizations have implemented these recommendations, with the majority of the examples coming from Virginia institutions.

Many victim advocates have increasingly recognized the benefits of working more closely with sex offender treatment and management professionals, and those systems, in turn, are working to become more victim-centered in their approaches. In 2012, the Center for Sex Offender Management (CSOM) was awarded an Office on Violence Against Women Technical Assistance grant to develop resources related to this type of collaboration. CSOM partnered with the Resource Sharing Project, the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, and NSVRC, over the next few years to develop resources and trainings. The first phase of this process involved surveying victim advocates, sex offender treatment providers, and management officers to identify the current level of cross-disciplinary collaboration occurring in communities. All three groups, interestingly, indicated a strong desire for more collaboration with their local counterparts; however very little meaningful collaboration was actually occurring at the time. The surveys further identified some of the common barriers being lack of understanding of one another’s roles and responsibilities; differing language and philosophies; and not knowing how to get started. The four collaborative partners worked together to create resources and tools to begin to address some of these common barriers, and to facilitate stronger collaborations.

"Promoting Collaboration Between Victim Advocates and Sex Offender Management Professionals: A Resource Package" is the first tool produced by this collaboration.

The purpose of the SANE Program Development and Operation Guide (Guide) is to provide a blueprint for nurses and communities that would like to start a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program. For communities with existing SANE programs, the Guide serves as a resource to help expand or enhance services provided to the community. This Guide is designed to both complement and integrate resources that already exist.

The National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) seeks feedback from the 60 state and territory sexual assault coalitions and 55 Rape Prevention Education grantees at the state and territory departments of health on prevention priorities in the biannual Priority Poll. Here are this year's results.

This research translation provides a summary of key findings on sexual violence as a component of interpersonal violence that is the wider focus of the Global Status Report on Violence Prevention 2014. People working to end sexual violence can use these findings to inform data collection, prevention planning and evaluation, policy advocacy, and community partnerships.

These documents support the June 2016 online xCHANGE Forum: Exploring restorative justice and cultural relevance. This forum explores current research and best practices that involves cases of sexual violence and the culturally unique needs of our communities.

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This site is supported by Grant/ Cooperative Agreement No. 1UF2CE002359-04 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.